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How can the public be protected from poorly trained therapists?

Dear Mark,

I have been around in the field of psychotherapy since 1964, when I started my psychiatric nursing and ended up a psychologist. Nowadays, there are so many poorly trained hypnotherapists who honestly do more harm. How do you protect the integrity of your business and students when we still have no proper regulatory body?

It is still a minefield for the customer seeking a well-trained professional therapist. What are your views on proper regulations and a set standard for all training schools?

Joseph Grennell
Psychologist, NLP master, hypnotherapist, nurse, social worker

This question was submitted by 'Joseph Grennell'

mark tyrrell

Mark says...

Dear Joseph,

Thank you so much for your question. It's a tricky one and I think the answer might not lie in more regulation, but rather in public education. Take a look at these two links for a really good summation of what constitutes effective therapy and what makes an effective therapist.

More legal regulation doesn't necessarily help unless those regulating understand that psychotherapy (including those psychotherapists who do inner work with their clients using hypnosis) isn't a matter of personal taste or experimentalism, but needs to be grounded on real evidence.

For example, the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) certainly has and does support therapy methods with ideology and efficacy that have been shown to be wrong. There was (and maybe still is) a 'primal cause' school 'authenticated' and recognized by the BACP that taught their practitioners that all human emotional ailments (and many physical ones, such as asthma) were a consequence of early sexual abuse that needed to be recovered. They literally had a flow chart from ailment to particular type of sexual abuse. So asthma, panic attacks, or depression, it was taught, were results of unremembered sexual abuse and many clients of therapists trained in this damaging and unsubstantiated dogma were harmed by the 'therapy'.

Psychodynamic counselling is universally accredited, yet research has found it toxic to the treatment of depression.

So I am somewhat cynical about regulation in that sense. There is a taboo amongst the therapy profession to talk like this, but taboos can be really dangerous, I think. : )

We all need to learn more about the human condition, human needs, and emotions. You might find these blogs interesting:

All my best,

Mark

watch icon Published by Mark Tyrrell - July 21st, 2014 in

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